Your View: The lessons of Hattie Carroll

Wednesday

Oct 19, 2016 at 2:01 AM

By G. Jefferson Price III

Fifty-three years ago, in the winter of 1963, William Devereux Zantzinger, a 24-year-old white tobacco farmer from Charles County in Southern Maryland, appeared drunk at a socialite dance in a Baltimore hotel where he launched into a torrent of racist profanity and lashed several black hotel employees with a carnival-style bamboo cane he was carrying.

One waitress whom he had caned several times, a 51-year-old mother of 11 named Hattie Carroll, slumped against the bar and gasped to her fellow employees, “This man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill.” Later that night, she died at a hospital a couple of blocks from the hotel where she had been thrashed by Zantzinger.

This horrific moment of shame in Baltimore and American history came to mind last week when it was announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Dylan memorialized the incident in a song titled “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” on his 1964 album “The Times They Are A Changin’”

Dylan has been criticized for liberties he took with the facts of the Hattie Carroll case in his lyrics, writing in the first verse:

“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’ ... “

Zantzinger, whose name Dylan misspelled, was originally charged with homicide but ultimately was convicted of manslaughter on evidence that Carroll suffered from other longstanding health issues that were factors in her death, including an enlarged heart and hypertension. The Baltimore medical examiner ruled she had died of a brain hemorrhage.

In another part of the lyricd, Dylan incorrectly called Carroll the mother of 10 rather than 11, apparently because 11 didn’t fit the meter he wanted.

Zantzinger, who was also charged with assaulting two other black hotel employees with his cane, was fined $500 and sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence he served working in the kitchen at the Washington county jail in Western Maryland rather than the jail in Baltimore, where it was feared he would have been killed by local inmates, the majority of whom were black. The trial had been moved to Western Maryland from Baltimore, where racial tensions had been running high even before the beatings of Hattie Carroll and her fellow employees.

The court also showed its concern for Zantzinger’s economic well-being by allowing him to remain out on bail for two weeks between conviction and sentencing so he could harvest the tobacco crop at his 630-acre farm in Southern Maryland.

The death of Hattie Carroll was in 1963, mind you, not 1863, but Zantzinger was of a mindset that never stopped yearning for the past when the white race was the master race, and the black race existed to serve it and to endure physical abuse and, yes, even death, in service to the white man.

Other stories appearing in The Baltimore Sun alongside the June 20, 1963, report of Zantzinger’s trial offer up a good picture of where Maryland stood in the civil rights struggle. One article headlined “Prison Dining Integrated” reported: “Negro and white inmates dined together without incident today as state prison officials went ahead with plans to integrate the Maryland Institute for Men.” Another article reported the owners of a Baltimore area amusement park “declined an invitation from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations ... to discuss the park’s segregation policy.”

Five years later, huge swathes of the city were in flames and the National Guard was trying to enforce martial law as protests following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King tore at the city’s economic and social fabric.

Zantzinger’s caning of blacks serving in the Emerson Hotel ballroom accompanied tongue-lashings filled with the vilest racist epithets. His appearance with his wife, Jane, at the Spinster’s Ball, a charity event staged by Baltimore’s social prominenti of the day was preceded by similar behavior at a Baltimore restaurant where Zantzinger threw down double martinis and his wife loaded up on five double scotches, according to court testimony. The evidence that they were both utterly drunk seems to have been a factor in the court’s leniency.

Nothing much was heard from or about Zantzinger until a quarter century later, in 1991, when a local newspaper exposed the fact that he was continuing to collect rent — more than $60,000 over a five-year period — from poor blacks living in run-down shacks in a southern Maryland property he had once owned but which had long before been seized by Charles County for failure to pay taxes. These dwellings had no plumbing and did not even have outhouses.

At a trial, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to more than four dozen charges related to the phony landlord actions. According to news reports of the time, he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison, which he served apparently only at night.

A Washington Post reporter went down to Charles County in 1991 to talk to people who knew Zantzinger. One friend, the late Michael Sprague, then representing Charles County in the Maryland House of Delegates, described Zantzinger as “a regular old Southern Maryland boy. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.”

The old mindset still hadn’t changed much. And one can just imagine which candidate for president would have been supported in this year’s election by Sprague and his good ole boy friend, William Devereux Zantzinger if they were alive today.

Zantzinger died on Jan. 3, 2009, 17 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. Wherever he went in the afterlife, one can only hope Hattie Carroll was there to make sure he didn’t get into her neighborhood.

The Baltimore Sun obituary by Jacques Kelly and Frederick N. Rasmussen, noted: “For years, Zantzinger declined to answer questions about Dylan’s song, but he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes in 2001: ‘He’s just a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie.’”

Sound familiar?

G. Jefferson Price III worked at the Baltimore Sun from 1969 to 2004 as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist. He lives in Dartmouth.